arXiv:2601.02232cs.LG2026-01Conference of the …被引 2

让大模型持续学习不遗忘,还能越学越强。

ELLA: Efficient Lifelong Learning for Adapters in Large Language Models

  • 通过选择性解相关机制,保留有用记忆并减少干扰
  • 在三个基准上准确率提升最高达9.6%,内存开销缩小35倍
  • 无需重放数据或扩展结构,适合实际部署的长期学习

大型语言模型在连续适应新任务时面临严重灾难性遗忘。现有方法存在根本局限:基于重放的方法不切实际且侵犯隐私,而严格正交方法在规模下会失效——每次新任务都投影到正交补空间,逐步压缩剩余自由度,禁止共享表示重叠,导致前向迁移消失。本文提出ELLA,一种基于选择性子空间解相关的训练框架。不同于完全禁止重叠,ELLA显式刻画历史更新结构,仅惩罚在高能量、任务特异性方向上的对齐,同时保留低能量残差子空间的自由度以支持迁移。该机制通过单个聚合更新矩阵的轻量正则化实现。理论上,这对应于各向异性的收缩算子,能有效控制干扰,且内存与计算开销恒定,不受任务序列长度影响。ELLA无需数据重放、架构扩展及额外存储。实验表明,其在三个主流基准上达到当前最优连续学习性能,相对准确率提升最高达9.6%,内存占用减少35倍。此外,ELLA在不同架构上均表现稳健,并显著提升模型对未见任务的零样本泛化能力,为大模型的建设性持续适应提供了原则性且可扩展的解决方案。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer severe catastrophic forgetting when adapted sequentially to new tasks in a continual learning (CL) setting. Existing approaches are fundamentally limited: replay-based methods are impractical and privacy-violating, while strict orthogonality-based methods collapse under scale: each new task is projected onto an orthogonal complement, progressively reducing the residual degrees of freedom and eliminating forward transfer by forbidding overlap in shared representations. In this work, we introduce ELLA, a training framework built on the principle of selective subspace de-correlation. Rather than forbidding all overlap, ELLA explicitly characterizes the structure of past updates and penalizes alignments along their high-energy, task-specific directions, while preserving freedom in the low-energy residual subspaces to enable transfer. Formally, this is realized via a lightweight regularizer on a single aggregated update matrix. We prove this mechanism corresponds to an anisotropic shrinkage operator that bounds interference, yielding a penalty that is both memory- and compute-constant regardless of task sequence length. ELLA requires no data replay, no architectural expansion, and negligible storage. Empirically, it achieves state-of-the-art CL performance on three popular benchmarks, with relative accuracy gains of up to $9.6\%$ and a $35\times$ smaller memory footprint. Further, ELLA scales robustly across architectures and actively enhances the model's zero-shot generalization performance on unseen tasks, establishing a principled and scalable solution for constructive lifelong LLM adaptation.

持续学习大模型遗忘抑制

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